Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  William K. Vanderbilt grew into an outstandingly good-looking young man who later became famous for his charm, hospitality and agreeable manners. Consuelo adored him. ‘[He] found life a happy adventure …,’ she wrote. ‘His pleasure was to see people happy.’20 The problem for such a gregarious young Vanderbilt was that while his grandfather the Commodore was alive there was little possibility of making an entrée into New York society, or of enjoying a life of leisure. The Commodore’s reputation as a vulgarian put paid to contact with New York’s emerging social elite; and while his grandfather retained an iron grip on the family fortune, it was essential to behave as he wished. ‘What you’ve got isn’t worth anything unless you have got the power,’ was one of the Commodore’s favourite financial saws.21 Even in 1875, two years before he died, he continued to strike fear into the heart of his relations. He believed that extravagance was a weakness, a sign that one was not responsible enough to inherit a cent. ‘He’s a bad boy,’ he said of his son Cornelius Jeremiah. ‘Money slips through his fingers like water through a sieve.’22

  In 1868, William K., whom the Commodore liked, had no choice other than to join the family railroad enterprise alongside his brother Cornelius II and start learning the railroad business, some way down the hierarchy of the Hudson River Railroad. For a charming and sociable youth, this cannot always have been easy. For the time being, however, there was little alternative to assenting amiably to the Commodore’s assertion that only ‘“hard and disagreeable work” would keep his grandsons from becoming “spoilt”.’23

  The person who would not only solve William K.’s problem but do much to change society’s perception of the Vanderbilts was Alva, nee Erskine Smith, later Mrs Oliver H. P. Belmont and the mother-of-the-bride. The reasons why she was drawn to this challenge lay deep in her own background, about which there remain many misconceptions. She has variously been described – in even scholarly works – as the daughter of the wealthiest couple in Savannah, and so poor that she helped her father keep a boarding house in New York after the American Civil War.24 Whereas Consuelo, her own daughter, thought that her mother was the daughter of a ruined plantation owner.25 Some of this was Alva’s fault for she often exaggerated to suit her purpose, particularly when it came to issues of status and power. Commodore Vanderbilt’s disdain for New York society was particularly unusual; for many others nineteenth-century America was a time of straightforward struggle for social advantage. Alva was one of them, and she was not alone in claiming aristocratic genealogy to assist her case.

  On her father’s side, she maintained that her pedigree stretched back to Scotland, and the Earls of Stirling. She was named Alva after Lord Alva, a Stirling descendant, and she called her youngest son Harold Stirling Vanderbilt to underscore the connection. One of her Stirling forebears emigrated to Virginia, and married a Smith of Virginia. Her father, Murray Forbes Smith, was a descendant of this line. The antecedents of Alva’s mother, Phoebe Desha, were much less hazy. She – rather than Alva – was the daughter of a plantation owner, the distinguished and powerful General Robert Desha of Kentucky, who won his rank in the war of 1812, and was twice elected to the House of Representatives. Her uncle, Joseph Desha, was a governor of Kentucky. Thus far, Alva’s claims to a relationship with America’s southern landed aristocracy appear to have been valid, but in her parents’ generation they became diluted. Murray Forbes Smith had just finished training to be a lawyer in Virginia when he met Phoebe Desha. ‘His entire career, like all women’s but unlike most men’s was upset by this marriage,’26 Alva wrote later, for his powerful father-in-law persuaded him to abandon his fledgling legal practice and move to Mobile, Alabama to look after the family cotton interests. This made Murray Forbes Smith, in effect, a superior cotton sales agent working on behalf of the Kentucky Deshas.

  While there may be some confusion about her background there is no doubt at all about the strength of Alva’s personality, which impressed itself on everyone who ever met her. ‘When convinced,’ said one witness ‘Not God nor the devil can frighten her off.’27 ‘When she speaks, prudent men go and get behind something and consider in which direction they can get away best,’28 said another. ‘Her combative nature rejoiced in conquests,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘A born dictator, she dominated events about her as thoroughly as she eventually dominated her husband and her children. If she admitted another point of view she never conceded it.’29 If anything, Consuelo, anxious not to appear over-critical of her mother, always downplayed Alva’s forcefulness. Alva, by contrast, seemed to take great pride in her own strength of character to the point of sounding puzzled by the strange impulse within her and writing in her (unpublished) autobiography: ‘There was a force in me that seemed to compel me to do what I wanted to do regardless of what might happen afterwards … I have known this condition often during my life.’30

  Alva explained her dominant personality by saying that she had been born forceful, that she was the seventh child and – according to an old saying – the seventh child was always the strongest and the mainstay of the family. Elsewhere she attributed it to her upbringing, particularly her mother. ‘There is, I believe, no stronger influence on the development of character and personality than our early environment, and childhood memories,’31 she wrote. It is difficult to dispute this. Her domineering character was given free rein by her strong-minded mother in childhood, and family circumstances which involved a weakened father in her teenage years conspired to emancipate it entirely.

  The Smiths moved to Mobile in boom years for the cotton trade, when Mobile was a great cotton port. In 1858, Hiram Fuller described Mobile as ‘a pleasant cotton city of some thirty thousand inhabitants, where the people live in cotton trade and ride in cotton carriages. They buy cotton, sell cotton, think cotton, eat cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children.’32 Life for the Murray Forbes Smiths was not entirely happy, however. According to one account, Phoebe was determined to show the cotton wives how things were done by grand families such as the Deshas of Kentucky. Sadly, Mobile society was first indifferent and then irritated. Alva omits to mention in any account of her childhood that Phoebe’s attempt to conquer Mobile ended in abject failure, and would not have been pleased by a book which appeared some years later where her mother’s social efforts in Mobile were pilloried. ‘Some people ate Mrs Smith’s suppers; many did not. There was needless and ungracious comment, and one swift writer pasquinaded her social ambitions in a pamphlet for “private” circulation. Then the lady concluded that Mobile was … unripe for conquest,’33 commented Thomas De Leon in 1909.

  Mobile must have been a difficult time for the Smiths in other ways. Alva was born on 17 January 1853, the seventh of nine children, of whom four died in infancy. Of the eight children born to the Smiths in Mobile, three are buried in Magnolia Cemetery – Alice, aged twenty months in 1847, one-year-old Eleanor in 1851, and thirteen-year-old Murray Forbes Smith Jr in 1857.34 In her memoirs (which she wrote after her conversion to the cause which would dominate her later life – women’s suffrage), Alva traced intense feelings of resentment towards men back to the death of this brother, Murray Forbes Jr. He died when she was four, and she grew up being made to feel that as far as her father was concerned, the death of his thirteen-year-old son and namesake was a far greater loss than her baby sisters. ‘He was always kind to us, always generous in his provision and care, but atmospherically he made his daughters feel that the family was best represented in the sons … I didn’t suffer with tearful sadness but with violent resentment.’35

  In spite of this, Alva remembered the house in Mobile with deep longing. The Smiths were comfortably off and their house stood at the corner of Conception and Government Streets, one of the grandest and most distinctive houses in Mobile with crenellations round the roof, and a Renaissance suggestion to the porches. Memory of the dream house of early childhood would haunt her all her life, influencing the design of the remarkable houses she created as an adul
t: ‘Always these houses, real and imaginary, reproduced certain features of the home in which I was born and where my early childhood was spent … It had large rooms, wide halls, high ceilings, with high casement windows opening upon the surrounding gardens … apart from the big house, also, was the bath house. The floor and bath were of marble, and marble steps led down into the bath which was cut out and below the level of the floor.’36 When Alva was six, her parents decided to leave Mobile and go to New York. Quite apart from his wife’s problems with Mobile society, Murray Smith sensed that success as a ‘commission merchant’ would be unsustainable if he stayed. His judgement (correct, as it turned out) was that the rapid spread of railroads would tip the balance from Mobile and the ports of the Gulf of Mexico in favour of New York. It was therefore the onward march of the American railroads that would ultimately bring the Smiths and Vanderbilts together.

  The Smiths’ move to New York shortly before the Civil War initially seemed well judged. They avoided the depression in the South that came with the Civil War, and profited from a property boom in Mobile. Several characteristics of nineteenth-century southern life moved with them. Like almost every other well-to-do southern antebellum family, the Murray Smiths had slaves, given to Phoebe by her father in lieu of a marriage settlement. These slaves went with the Smiths to New York. Alva had her particular favourite, Monroe Crawford, whom she adored. ‘The reason Monroe Crawford and I got along without conflict for the most part was because I managed the situation, I wanted my own way and with Monroe I got it. I bossed him. It was a case of absolute control on my part,’37 she told Sara Bard Field, the writer and poet to whom she dictated her first set of memoirs in 1917. Though Alva never said so, this early exposure to a system of human relations based on slavery may explain as much about her as Murray Smith’s lack of interest in his daughters. She never entirely lost the habits of mind of a southern slave owner in relation to those she regarded as her inferiors: more profoundly such total control over another human being at such a young age can only have contributed to Alva’s later obsession with power and control, and her almost phobic fear of losing her grip on it.

  There were other aspects of her childhood that set the Smith children apart from middle-class New York. First, they were unusually international in outlook, partly, no doubt, as a result of their southern parents. Prosperous southerners were a familiar sight in London even in the eighteenth century and Phoebe Smith loved travelling. She began taking her children abroad when they were very young. One expedition included a babe in arms, a little dog, two maids, and a southern mocking bird in precarious health in a large cage. They all crossed the Atlantic in a wooden paddle steamer on a voyage which took fourteen days, and travelled to England, France, Germany, Austria and Italy. While it would clearly have been easier to leave her children at home, Phoebe Smith liked to broaden their minds and teach them to observe. This international outlook also extended to fashion. ‘My mother, who loved the beautiful in dress as in all else, preferred the clothes made by European dressmakers, designed as they were by artists of an older civilisation, to those worn in her time by women in the United States. It was her custom, therefore, to order from Paris her own clothes, and later those of her children. Twice a year, from Olympe, a famous house of that day, would come a box containing clothes sufficient for our needs for the next six months.’38 Alva would pass on this feeling for French style and couture to Consuelo, but in childhood she did not appreciate being a fashion pioneer. Parisian outfits were a major provocation to sniggering little New York boys, whom she claims to have pitched into the gutter.

  One striking feature of Alva’s account of her nineteenth-century upbringing in New York is the extent to which she presents herself as an aggressive, violent child. It was impossible to find a nurse to manage her. When she wanted to leave the nursery for a room of her own she smashed it up; and she particularly enjoyed thumping boy playmates when displeased. Any boy who teased her soon learnt better. ‘I can almost feel my childish hot blood rise as it did then in rebellion at some such taunting remarks as “You can’t run”; “You can’t climb trees”; “You can’t fight. You are only a girl,”’ she once wrote in a letter to a friend.39 Even at thirteen, passers-by had to pull her apart from a male tormentor in a fight so fierce that Alva boasted it was reported in the local newspaper. No-one has ever succeeded in tracing this report, but it is telling that it was a story Alva liked to recount about herself. ‘I caught him and threw him to the ground. I choked him and banged his head upon the ground. I stomped on him screaming: “I’ll show you what girls can do,”’ she told Sara Bard Field.40 It comes as no surprise that Alva had few girl playmates. She greatly preferred playing with the opposite sex, for she found boys’ lives more interesting. ‘I wanted activity and I could not find enough of it in the circumscribed and limited life of a girl. So I played with boys and I met them on their own ground. I asked for no compromise or advantage. I gave blow for blow.’41

  It is perhaps surprising that although she detested the life conventionally lived by nineteenth-century American girls, Alva liked playing with dolls and designing imaginary houses – two activities that she regarded as closely connected. She told Sara Bard Field that she was unable to sleep if her sisters left their dolls sitting up with their clothes on: ‘I loved dolls … I took them very seriously. I put into their china or sawdust bodies all my own feelings. They could be hot or cold. They could be weary, sleepy and hungry. Their treatment had to vary accordingly to these supposed conditions.’42 She saw this as a childish manifestation of maternal instinct which she thought men had downgraded. She saw no contradiction between her love of dolls and her rebellion against the constricted life of a girl, claiming: ‘It is because I must have felt then in an inarticulate way and feel now with a passionate conviction that the very fact of her maternity which men have used to lower woman’s status, raises her to superior position. Thus my love for the doll children and my rebellion against the superimposed restrictions of a girl’s life were bound up together’43 – an insight which would have an impact on Consuelo later.

  Phoebe Smith was ahead of her time in the amount of freedom she granted her headstrong daughter, allowing Alva to ride out alone all day when they holidayed in Newport. She had no hesitation, however, in whipping Alva when the boundary was finally crossed – when, for example, she took a horse from the stable and rode bareback in the garden (Alva maintained that the pleasure was worth the whipping, and her streak of physical daring was noted by others throughout her life). Alva expressed it to Sara Bard Field thus: ‘My Mother found me the most difficult of all her children to train. The combination of rebellion and daring were difficult for her to meet. And in those days there was no Montissori [sic] methods and books on child psychology by which parents directed their training of children. The rod was the all-sufficient guide and to this my Mother resorted. There is a record in our family of my receiving a whipping every single day one year … but the end I desired was always strong enough to overcome the fear of the whipping … I was an impossible child.’44

  Moving north before the start of Civil War, the Smiths appear to have made a smooth entrée into New York society. New York’s elite at this period has often been seen in terms of a dichotomy between the old introverted ‘Knickerbockcracy’ – descendants of the original Dutch settlers, the Knickerbockers – on the one hand, and extrovert new money on the other. However, New York society was always more permeable than this suggests, and making one’s mark on society was largely a question of becoming part of the right networks and (unlike the Commodore) demonstrating that one understood society’s rules and wished to opt in. Genteel in values, tone and style, the Smiths fitted quite easily into New York’s socially mobile elite before the Civil War, and there is every reason to suppose that without this unfortunate interruption, they would have soon felt well established. After a brief spell in a house at 209 Fifth Avenue, the family moved to a fine house at 40 Fifth Avenue, built for an affluent merchant i
n the 1850s by the well-known architect Calvert Vaux. New York City tax assessments of the house bear out Alva’s assertion that the family was well-to-do at the time of the move north, for records put its value at between $25,000 and $39,000, making it one of the more valuable houses in the city.45

  Nonetheless, some of Alva’s assertions about the social position of the Smiths in New York during this pre-war period are simply wrong – saying much about Phoebe’s own social anxieties since she was probably the source of the errors. Alva maintains, for example, that her mother was on the receiving line for the Prince of Wales at a famous ball held in his honour in New York in 1860. If true, this would have put Phoebe Smith at the pinnacle of society, but the ball took place on 12 October, seven days before Phoebe gave birth to her second daughter, Julia, in Mobile, Alabama.46 Phoebe would not have stepped out of doors, let alone travelled to New York. Similarly, Alva suggests that the Smiths’ entrance into New York circles came through the department store owner Alexander T. Stewart, but Stewart had an uneasy relationship with New York’s elite because he was a shopkeeper, and was suspected of vulgarity. The Smiths did not, as she claimed, have a box at the Academy of Music, though they may well have attended performances there; neither did they have a pew at Grace Church (one clear marker of membership of New York’s inner circle), though they belonged to another fashionable Episcopalian church, the Church of the Ascension.